Lonely planets, Martian tracks and charred Soyuz - in pictures

Lonely planets, Martian tracks and charred Soyuz - in pictures

Our pick of last month's images includes a planet floating untethered in space, cryptic rover tracks on Mars and a Soyuz capsule scorched during re-entry

Friday 10 June 2011 11.57 EDT

A backlit droplet of heptane fuel burns in microgravity on the International Space Station. Fuels burn very differently in the absence of gravity. Image-processing techniques quantify the soot concentration at each point to produce a grey-scale image, which is then colourised. This is a composite of individual video framesPhotograph: Nasa

This image from Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope shows a stellar nursery containing thousands of young stars and developing protostars near the sword of the constellation Orion. Massive stars light up the Orion nebula, the bright region near the centre of the image. To the north of the nebula is a dark filamentary cloud of cold dust and gas over five light years long, containing ruby red protostars that jewel the hilt of Orion's sword

A diver simulates anchoring to the surface of an asteroid, part of Nasa's
Extreme Environment Mission Operations project. Moving around on the surface of an asteroid – with little or no gravity to hold astronauts or vehicles in place – will require several anchors linked to form pathways

Some 90 years ago, Edwin Hubble used pulsating stars called cepheids to demonstrate that
the universe extends far beyond our own galaxy. He proved that these stars were too far away to be part of our Milky Way galaxy. The circle in the box, top right, marks the location of one of the cepheids he used,
in the galaxy Andromeda. At first he thought it was an exploding star (labelling it N for nova) but then realised it was a cepheid variable, crossing out the N and writing 'VAR!'

Testing the Grail twins: Technicians prepare to hoist Grail-A out of a vacuum chamber after tests to see how well the two spacecraft will weather the rigours of space. The craft, scheduled for launch late this summer, will orbit the moon and measure its gravity field in unprecedented detailPhotograph: JPL-Caltech/LMSS/Nasa

This image of the shuttle Endeavour launching on its final mission on 16 May
cleverly combines six images shot at different exposures to reveal previously unseen detail, for example in the bright rocket exhaust. Processing software digitally removes pure black or pure white pixels from one image and replaces them with the best exposed corresponding pixel from the five other images. The technique can help identify debris falling during launchPhotograph: Nasa

Jets and radio-emitting lobes shoot from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy Centaurus A. The image –
from Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory – is a composite of visible, microwave (orange) and x-ray (blue) dataPhotograph: ESO/Nasa

Artist's impression of a Jupiter-like planet floating free in the immensity of space. Astronomers uncovered
evidence for 10 such worlds, which are thought to have been "booted" from developing solar systems